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No-mere-hype hyper-converged systems clock hyper-growth

IDC's tracker finds FlexPods flourishing, Vblocks/VxBlocks faltering

Analyst firm IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker shows overall converged systems revenue for 2017's first quarter increased year over year but only because of bonkers growth in hyper-converged systems.

The Tracker divides the converged systems market into four segments, and combines two of them in its published figures;

  • Integrated Infrastructure - like VxBlocks
  • Certified Reference Systems - like FlexPod
  • Integrated Platforms - like Oracle engineered systems
  • Hyper-converged Systems

Total worldwide converged systems market revenues increased 4.6 per cent year over year (y-on-y) to $2.67 billion in 2017's first quarter, with customers buying 1.48 EB of storage, up 7.1 per cent y-on-y.

The overall stats for the three market segments the firm publicises are as follows:

Q1 CY2017 Integrated Infrastructure & Certified Reference Systems Integrated Platforms Hyper-converged Systems
Value $1,372,500,000 $635,900,000 $665,100,000
Percent Share 51.3% 23.8% 24.9%
Annual Change -3.3% -13.3% 64.7%

Another quarter of HCI growth at the same rate would see $1.1 Bn in revenues while Integrated Infrastructure & Certified Reference Systems, declining again at 3.3 per cent would see $1.33 Bn, with HCI overtaking in the third quarter if growth rates stayed the same.

The top vendors in the Integrated Infrastructure & Certified Reference Systems area were;

Q1 cy2017 Revenue Market Share Year-ago Revenue Year-ago Market Share Y-o-Y Revenue Growth
Dell (+EMC) $647,800,000 47.2% $667,300,000 47% -2.9%
Cisco/NetApp $395,600,000 28.8% $313,700,000 22.1% 26.1%
HPE $206,200,000 15% $291,100,000 20.5% -29.2%
Others $122,800,00 9% $146,900,000 10.4% -16.4%
Total $1,372,500,000 100% $1,419,100,000 100% -3.3%

Cisco and NetApp's Flexpods were the only growth product in this segment of the market, with HPE being the largest share loser in this combined segment. Dell also gained market share, by declining less than the market overall.

Here are the Integrated Platform numbers for the top vendors;

Q1 CY2017 Revenue Market Share Year-ago Revenue Year-ago Share Y-on-Y Revenue Growth
Oracle $348,700,000 54.8% $379,600,000 51.8% -8.1%
HPE $61,700,000 9.7% $65,800,000 9% -6.2%
IBM $19,900,000 3.1% $26,600,000 3.6% -25.1%
Hitachi $19,600,000 3.1% $28,000,000 3.8% -30.1%
Others $185,900,000 29.2% $233,100,000 31.3% -20.2%
Total $635,000,000 100% $733,100,000 100% -13.3%

In this segment all vendors' revenues declined y-on-y, with Oracle and HPE gaining share in a declining market.

Annoyingly IDC doesn't break down the hyper-converged numbers into supplier shares in its published info. So we don't know if Dell (EMC) has overtaken Nutanix or not, or how well or badly any supplier has done.

IDC does publish a chart showing the segment changes over the past few quarters;

IDC_CI_Tracker_chart_Q1_cy2017

The data for converged systems in all their forms comes against a background of Q4 2016's sales dip and poor sales of standalone servers. ®

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